Surveillance Capitalism and the Effects on Our Community
By Faiza Zia Khan
Newport Beach, CA
The coronavirus pandemic has transformed the worksphere in more ways than one. Millions of jobs became remote, i.e., work from home (WFH) as employees were barred from coming into office spaces and buildings. Recently, many large multinational corporations have permanently given up physical offices and transitioned to remote-only operations.
This shift has demonstrated a significant increase in productivity due to less time spent in commuting, child-care costs, etc., and lower overhead costs for companies to survive with after taking financial hits from the pandemic. It is a win-win situation for both employees and employers. At least that is what the optics look like on the surface.
With a large number of the workforce logging in daily through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access the corporate system remotely is a requirement. Most employees use their own personal hardware devices like laptops or computers to access work VPNs which makes it even more cost-effective for companies. Enhanced technological infrastructure had to be provided to accommodate additional load on the VPN in terms of licensing costs and bandwidth. Overall, it allowed the companies to keep their employees on the job instead of massive layoffs. However, even with these financial costs added to the budgets, corporations still fared better than the provisions they had to put in place to get employees back into the offices.
Strict social distancing guidelines have been put in place through the state legislature before allowing employees back on office premises, thus making it impossible for companies to let people back in unless they were properly ready.
The mantra, “High-Tech is watching you!” has become even more popular than before due to the whole work-from-home scenario. Much greater scrutiny is now required by the employers to keep a check on the activities and behaviors of the employees when they were not physically present in the office buildings. Before, this was easily achieved by cameras installed within the offices, but now as everyone sits in the comfort of their homes this has become more challenging. Mostly, the surveillance is to ensure workflow processes run smoothly and meeting deadlines in a timely manner. Here comes into play surveillance capitalism.
Corporations replicated a similar model that was reinforced by social media companies a few years ago to keep track of employees online behavior. Counting keyboard strokes, mouse clicks, and email tracking all allow employers to know how much work the employees are putting in. Not that there are any foreseeable plans of using this data adversely, it simply gives access to employers to have a leash on employees for the time they are “on-the-clock.”
How can we analyze surveillance capitalism? In very easy terms surveillance capitalism is known as a market-driven process where personal data is traded as a tangible commodity (just like gold, silver, or stocks). The production of this data is sourced from mass surveillance of internet activity stemming from the use of online services (such as Google, ebay, bing) and/or social media platforms (TikTok, SnapChat, Instagram etc.). These companies collect and scrutinize each and every mouse click (also known as Click-Through-Rate or CTR), likes, dislikes, searches, pages visited, purchases, and history. As we scroll aimlessly on our phones through the social media-sphere we are completely unaware that each and every movement is under surveillance and is being recorded behind the scenes. From the time we login, to the seconds we stay on each page, and the ones we avoid are all recorded. Years and years worth of data on each social media user is stored away and later sold to those who are willing to pay the price for commercial use. This data is used to produce statistics on trends and promotional profitability. As users of social media we may never fully understand the extent of surveillance we are subject to by these companies.
Social media seemingly started as a fun idea for the creatively endowed but in reality a huge business model was put together to test the market. The first ones to jump on the bandwagon were Google Inc in 1998. Surveillance capitalism practices were used for data mining, data extraction, and data consolidation. Once this data was processed it was used to create new niche markets for mainstream users. Almost like creating an addiction for shopping, music, books, movies, online gaming among other recreational activities. Next came along Amazon, Facebook, eBay, and Whatsapp to create a monolithic coalition of data collection and storage that resulted in these names being the largest companies for market capitalization. Most recently, published statistics show Google processes an average of 40,000 plus searches per second, accumulating to 3.5 billion daily, and 1.2 trillion annually. From the financial records pulled in January 2020 before the pandemic struck Alphabet Inc. which is Google’s parent company, was valued at $1.0 trillion, making its entrance into the trillion dollar companies club for the first time.
As we go through our phones via our social media apps let’s try to be mindful of our activities and the time we spend looking through websites. A nice walk in the fresh outdoors would do us more good for our own physical health than the multinational conglomerates. Not that reducing our time on social media will make any difference on the trillions made by those who feeds off surveillance capitalism, it might create mindfulness for our own selves that we do not need to fill the pockets of those who are brimming full already due to lack of our own awareness.
(Faiza Zia Khan holds a Master’s in Journalism degree from the University of British Columbia, Canada. She has collaborated with news media outlets, including Global National, and actively volunteers for several community investment projects for the Red Cross, United Way and the Breast Cancer Foundation)
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